Foundation · Foundational

Ontology

Asks What exists, and what may connect?

The kinds a domain is made of and the relationships allowed between them, written down explicitly enough that two systems mean the same thing by the same word. Gruber's formulation is the working one: an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualisation. Left implicit, the same word carries a different shape in every system that uses it.

In this model Every kind and every typed relationship is declared before it is used. Every relationship names the kind at each end, so a connection the model has not declared cannot be asserted.

Represented by

The engineering standards that state this foundation directly, among the works the commitments stand on.

OWL 2 Web Ontology Language PrimerW3C
Toward Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge SharingThomas R. Gruber

Commitments it asks for — 8

What the build enforces — 12

registry integritytyped relationships
Every relationship has declared endpoint kinds and a governed cardinality.
registry integritythe hierarchy holds
A tactic stands within its campaign and an action within its tactic. For each containment the kernel declares, along the road that makes one the child of the other, the child narrows what the parent declares, a window, a geography, an audience, and never widens it, or keeps what the parent honours, a preference, a permission basis, and never drops it. A parent that declares nothing binds nothing, and the same road declared at two levels can no longer contradict itself.
registry integrityevent grain
Every event states the grain it is recorded at, a consumer is named as actor only in an event that is a person's act, and a journey move is triggered only by an event resolvable to one person, so a count of events is never mistaken for a count of people and no move of one person rests on a fact about nobody in particular.
registry integritycalculation and projection integrity
Formula inputs, metric composition, cardinality, and plan projections satisfy their declared contracts.
registry integrityadmission and shape
Every kind has a valid shape and evidence class, and every row keeps the admission its kind allows: a record names its source, an exemplar names none, and a world record states the public reference it stands on.
registry integritystable identifiers
Kind prefixes are unique, every row keeps the identity convention of its kind, and an identifier once retired is never reused: a kind writes each retirement down with its date and its reason, and every number below its highest is a row or a retirement.
Every pattern is a shape the model can hold, and every kind is in onePattern integrity
Every pattern's roles name kinds that exist and are named once; every edge is a declared relationship whose ends are its roles' kinds; the shape is connected and crosses no grounding, and a typing only where nothing leads on; a root, where declared, is the first role. A pattern with a root binds from some row, and every kind fills a role in some pattern.
registry integritylicensed fields
Every file conforms to the one declared schema before any other law runs: a row carries only the fields the model licenses, and every field has the type and, where the set is closed, the value the schema states, so material arriving from outside cannot introduce structure merely by arriving.
ring:0the form ring
Every file of the ground and the ledger is in canonical form.
ring:1the files ring
Every file, the two law files first, conforms to the declared schema and sits where the registries say it sits.
ring:4the artifact ring
The graph conforms to its own schema and names the ground it is a function of.
ring:8the standards ring
A SHACL validator and a SPARQL engine that are not this build agree with it.